The remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is exactly what the series needed, and every bit of the fan base’s celebration is justified.
There’s something so special about the first three Paper Mario games.
The games deviate from the mainline platforming titles that gave Super Mario popularity, focusing instead on its story and characters. The games are beloved by the Paper Mario fan base, but The Thousand-Year Door often stands out as the best of the best.
The Thousand-Year Door, the second entry in the series, improves upon the groundwork laid down by its predecessor in every way. Released in 2004 for the GameCube, the game oozes with so much personality and charm that it’s not hard to see why it’s so deeply admired by its fans.
Mario’s in-game partners have unique personalities and interactions with the player. The game’s sense of humour is delightful, and its constant creativity makes for a memorable experience. The game tells stories more complex than those of any mainline Mario game released prior – like a tournament with a secret investigation into disappearing fighters taking place between matches – making it stand out from the rest of the entire Mario catalogue.
For starters, the gameplay design is phenomenal. While it is considered an entry-level role-playing game (RPG), its battle design is easily understandable yet still successfully forces the player to strategize about their next move. The game retains the “Action Command” system from its predecessor, meaning that well-timed button presses can inflict extra damage upon an opponent or protect Mario from an enemy’s attack. The game is perfect for beginners to the RPG genre, yet it’s still an easy recommendation for seasoned players who are just looking for a fun time.
The game was followed by Super Paper Mario, the third entry in the series. After Super shifted towards the traditional platformer genre, fans were hopeful that the fourth Paper Mario title, revealed at E3 2010, would move back to a gameplay style reminiscent of the first two games. The third game was a very special experience for many and had retained the series’ soul, but many were ready for a return to form.
But what ended up releasing proved detrimental to the series’ future.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star released in 2012, and it lost everything that made the first three games special. Any meaningful sense of story had been eliminated, with any semblance of uniqueness replaced with the same cookie-cutter formula plaguing the main series games. This was especially painful because of the series’ roots in telling stories – in fact, the first Paper Mario game was named Mario Story in Japan.
An excellent example of this is shown within Sticker Star’s primary antagonist, Bowser, who had previously been a major point of comic relief within the series. In this entry, however, he couldn’t even speak. Despite returning to a turn-based battle system, it felt more like a traditional platformer with its story boiling down to “Bowser becomes powerful and kidnaps Peach” – again.
The similarities don’t end there. The game’s chapters follow the unoriginal theming of the “worlds” found within traditional Mario platformers. Rather than exploring unique and memorable locations with original characters to interact with, the game’s world consists of the same grasslands, deserts and forests in Mario’s 2D platformers. These locations work fine in a game where they essentially serve as no more than theming, but in a traditionally story-driven series, this choice is lifeless and bland.
Original character designs, a staple of the first three titles, are wiped out in Sticker Star. This entry relies on existing Mario designs, with an overabundance of generic Toads serving as non-playable characters rather than the unique characters within previous entries. Many of the Toads present in earlier entries had unique names, designs and personalities – Sticker Star offers nothing but an army of copy-and-pasted placeholders.
The game is also over-reliant on its paper theming. In previous titles, the name Paper Mario signified the flat designs of the characters and its storybook theming. In Sticker Star, however, the game’s art style shifted to appear as though the game’s world is entirely handcrafted from paper, and the gameplay elements (such as the titular stickers) follow this theme. While the new art style is pleasant to look at, it’s now the game’s central focus; and the new gameplay additions feel more like gimmicks than worthwhile additions to the series.
The battle system is inherently flawed, and its implementation of single-use attacks actively punishes players for engaging in battle – something that the previous games would reward you for. It’s baffling that the game designers somehow created a system that makes fleeing every battle strategically advantageous to taking down a foe.
Perhaps the game designers wanted to make the game feel different from its predecessors, as Shigeru Miyamoto requested during development. Or maybe they wanted to backtrack from Super Paper Mario, which Nintendo believed had a publicly disliked story. This notion came from a poll on Club Nintendo, a now-closed service which incentivised users to complete surveys to earn rewards. While this result could have come from a variety of factors such as a small sample size or users simply going through the poll to earn reward points, researching the game on the Internet reveals a major portion of the fan base that loves the game’s story.
Either way, it was clear that something had gone wrong in the development process, and these problems would live on in the next two Paper Mario entries.
This was further evidenced in an interview with Kensuke Tanabe, a producer for 2020’s Paper Mario: The Origami King. In the interview, Tanabe said that “since Paper Mario: Sticker Star, it’s no longer possible to modify Mario characters or to create original characters that touch on the Mario universe.”
Tanabe also lent credence to the theory that Super Paper Mario played a role in this shift in design philosophy:
“In Super Paper Mario, the elaborate story led the game away from the Mario universe, so since Paper Mario: Sticker Star I’ve refrained from using stories that are too complicated.”
This interview was the final nail in the coffin for many fans of the original three Paper Mario games. The producer had commented on internal limitations that would seemingly continue to affect the franchise, and despite the massive fan outcry and Tanabe’s uncertainty, it looked like the future of the franchise was set in stone.
This made it incredibly shocking when a remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was revealed during September’s Nintendo Direct.
The remake looks to be incredibly faithful to the original title, bringing back fan- favourite characters (and potentially introducing new ones). Its art style is the perfect blend of the original game’s basic look with the handcrafted style of the new games, creating a subtle paper theming. Regular turn-based battles appear to be back with new features intended to further streamline the overall experience. The music has been remastered so that the old melodies are kept, but they’re brought to life like the newer titles’ soundtracks.
Whatever restrictions were holding the developers back since Sticker Star have seemingly been removed. The game is a return to form in every way – in fact, with its array of improvements, it actually looks better than the original title.
With the game making a full return to modern hardware, younger players who never experienced the original trilogy will be able to enjoy this masterpiece without having to spend hundreds of dollars on eBay, inviting a new generation to join the classic Paper Mario fan base.
Perhaps this could even mean an original Paper Mario title in the style of the old titles is on the horizon, leading the series to regain its soul after years of mediocre releases.
Whatever might be next for Paper Mario, the future of the series has never looked brighter. The remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is more than a corporate response to years of fan feedback – it’s exactly what the series needed.
